


the tenderness in sentimental movies

by brella



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, Alive Allison, College, F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-27 02:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7599715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia isn't running away. Don't insult her. She's just... running somewhere new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the tenderness in sentimental movies

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, hello, it's me, back again. 
> 
> I am not 100% sure why I signed up for this fest other than loving the shit out of the way Stiles and Lydia hold hands sometimes, because I've not watched any _Teen Wolf_ past season... 4? I don't think I even finished it, either. So, uh... there may be significant differences between this and the current _Teen Wolf_ canon, notably several cast members missing. But oh well. The core four are all I've ever super cared about anyway. 
> 
> INFINITE THANKS, HUGS, AND GENTLE "I HATE YOU"S to my spectacular last-minute beta, Rachel (rongasm). She made this fic into things better than I ever could have. I swear to God she wrote a lovelier fic in the comments on the Google Doc than the entirety of my clumsy words combined. I love her so much even though she dragged me kicking and screaming back into this ship. She is an inspiration.

“When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth.”

Haruki Murakami, _Kafka on the Shore_

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**i.**

_[september song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGdKljrmxiQ) _

 

After everything, Lydia is the first one to leave ( _to run away_ , that murmur of her heart insists despite her protests). She’s not ashamed; not even a little. But she’s not exactly proud, either.

“No, I mean… that’s good,” Scott says to her, just after she’s told all of them and they’re standing on the lacrosse field and the early summer heat is opening up around them. They’ve just graduated high school, and it feels like the most astounding thing they could ever have done. None of them have felt further from werewolves, from darkness, from fear. “That’s really good, Lydia. You know we’re gonna miss you a lot, but…”

“But it’s important to follow your dreams, is what Scott means,” Allison says, and when she grins at Lydia, though her eyes are glistening, it’s broad and genuine.

Lydia made this decision long ago, after Alarming Brush with Death #507: Eichen House Edition. Her life needs to get a lot less _A Nightmare on Elm Street_ and a lot more _Legally Blonde_ , like, yesterday. Following her dreams is exactly what she plans on doing, if only to remind herself that she’s still got a few of them to spare.

Allison is her foremost confidante in all things—she certainly has more brains and common sense than the other two brainiacs in this quartet of weirdos—so she’s known for weeks now. She had given Lydia a proud smile and a sincere thumbs-up and a hug. Then they had watched _The Notebook_ and Lydia had made kettle corn and cried, like she did every time, and hadn’t felt silly or vulnerable, because _The Notebook_ is the only thing for which it is acceptable to shed tears, in her opinion.

Allison will be taking a gap year like the other two, to wash the nightmares away, to adjust to the idea that their lives are theirs now, and that the simple act of being alive might be the greatest challenge they’ve ever had to face.

Lydia doesn’t do gap years. She had never even considered it.

“Oh, stop,” she says presently, deftly holding in the emotion bubbling up in her chest, because the absolute _last_ thing she needs on her high school graduation day is to mess up her eyeliner. “It’s not even going to be that far. Really. Don’t start crying or anything.”

“Too late,” Scott sobs, flinging his arms around Lydia without restraint. “Lydia, seriously—we’re all super proud of you.” He tightens his hold infinitesimally. “You know that, right?”

There’s nothing quite like a hug from Scott. It’s sort of like getting a hug from the sun, if such a thing wouldn’t incinerate you to a pitiful whisper of existence instantaneously. Lydia reciprocates, holding him as tightly as she can, because it might be the last chance she’ll have in a while, and they’ve saved the world together, and they’re okay. They’re all okay.

She pats Scott’s shoulder as he sniffles into hers. After they had thrown their mortarboards skyward, he had embraced her around the middle and lifted her up, spinning her, and she hadn’t been able to stop laughing. Now, the breathless sound slipping out of her is something entirely different, something not quite happy but not quite sad, either; it’s a little bit afraid and a little bit exhilarated and a little bit embarrassed, because here they all are, standing in a circle, diplomas in hand, talking about saying goodbye, when they’ve vanquished spirits of darkness and chaos, when they’ve stared down death itself, when they’ve tethered one another to this world; this unsuspecting, remarkable world; this trampled field, this bottomless sky.

Lydia’s gaze wanders, unguarded, to Stiles. He looks taller, fuller; he fills his clothes out, now, instead of hiding in them, instead of letting them hang over him like curtains in front of a closed window. His mortarboard is still in his hand, and there’s a neon pink band-aid on his pinkie from where he had given himself a paper cut yesterday. Malia and Kira are standing beside him, lost in a fit of laughter over Scott’s outburst, but he looks as though he is unaware of them and everything else in the world. He’s smiling at the emotional proceedings in front of him, fond and steady, but there’s a rueful edge to it that makes Lydia ache. 

Without warning, his amber eyes lock with Lydia’s. For a heartbeat, that peculiar smile flickers, but it’s back so quickly that Lydia wouldn’t be surprised if she’d imagined it.

Suddenly they’re eight years old again, guarding secrets on the blacktop, each day feeling greater and more infinite than the last. Lydia watches in wonder as an unrepentant chuckle moves its way through Stiles, raising his shoulders, flushing his face. He looks so alive.

“It’s true,” he tells her. “We _are_ super proud of you.” He levels a finger at her in mock threat. “Hey, listen, you’d better not show your face around here again until you’ve got a Fields Medal to show off, got that?”

“Yes, _yes_ ,” Lydia sighs with faux exasperation, gently shooing Scott off of her now. “Please. As if I’d ever voluntarily come back to this hellhole. Rest assured I will _not_ miss it.”

They all exchange covert looks that immediately piss her off, but she doesn’t have time to address it, or to proceed with the fallout from the grand revelation that she will be leaving Beacon Hills behind to go to college out of state and dazzle scholars and finally be her own person instead of a shrieking, shivering _creature_ , before Melissa McCall and Sheriff Stilinski have appeared, demanding pictures.

At the classwide graduation party that night, she gets the impression that Stiles wants desperately to tell her something, but he can’t find the words, and she can’t find the time, and suddenly, the summer has come to an end, waning away into rosy, settling twilights. There are no pack wars, no nogitsune, no kaminas. There’s a mermaid, and a fireworks show, and a drive to Denny’s at 2 AM. That’s it.

Come September, everyone is seeing her off at the entrance to the TSA at Oakland Airport, and when his turn comes in her litany of farewell messages and hugs, the two of them only stare at each other for a moment, him slouched and sleepy-looking, her straight-spined and silent, before Stiles lowers his gaze and offers her his hand, and she shakes it, and it feels like her whole arm and everything attached are his, now, too.

“Knock ’em dead, Martin,” he tells her, and the most terrifying thought strikes Lydia, right then—if they weren’t in public, and if she weren’t afraid, she would most certainly stand on her tiptoes and kiss him.

“I intend to,” she says, tossing her shorter hair over her shoulder for haughty emphasis, and Stiles is the only one not waving when she glances back at them all before getting through security and moving out of visibility—he’s only watching her, the way one might watch a sunset, afraid to miss anything, struck with wonder at the beauty of the world and of things they could not understand.

Lydia intends, before she comes home, to understand everything, all of the things she had missed out on, all of the things that had manifested themselves as shapeless nightmares that made her wake up screaming. But for now, she’ll start with the clouds outside the small, rounded window beside her. Clouds can’t change their minds about anything.

 

 

 

 

 **ii.**  

_[autumn in new york](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yq_dlqQxg0) _

 

Lydia’s roommate is a Chemistry major, and she loves horror movies and learning about poisons, and Lydia is a little bit afraid of her, but in an admiring, respectful way. Her name is Phoebe.

“Damn,” she says on the first day—the _very first day_ ; Lydia is not joking; they’ve barely introduced themselves—with one hand on her hip and the other resting on one of Lydia’s many boxes of neatly packed clothes. “Now _that_ is the face of a girl who has seen some shit. Or maybe you just got a mouthful of that pizza in the dining hall. I can’t tell.”

“Let’s call it both,” Lydia says stiffly, simpering. She has indeed seen an excess of shit, but it is not exactly the kind of shit you can casually discuss in a Harvard dorm room.

Before you ask, yes, she is _mildly_ unsettled by the fact that her roommate might be prescient. So much for escaping the influence of Beacon Hills, Junior Hellmouth. But she’s not going to let it get to her. Phoebe is a genius, just like she is, and they both stoutly agree on one of Lydia’s greatest principles: love is pointless, and textbooks are forever.

“You got a boyfriend back home? Girlfriend?” Phoebe asks one night when they are _supposed_ to be studying for their midterms the next day (Lydia’s is for Oscillations and Waves; Phoebe’s is for Greek Thought), one foot dangling off the edge of her bed with a pencil clutched between her toes. “Multiples? I won’t judge.”

“ _No_ ,” Lydia says too swiftly. “And forgive me if I find this topic _vapid_.”

“Oh, come on,” Phoebe says. Her frizzy hair bounces when she snickers. “I can tell you miss _somebody_. It’s been eating at you all week; you keep saying some weird-ass name in your sleep.”

Lydia flushes up to the ears, but does her best to conceal it, ducking her face and adjusting her reading glasses—very Dana Scully, which is why she only ever deigns to wear them in private—and scanning the notes on her laptop with increased vigor. “You’re imagining things.”

She _doesn’t_ miss anyone. Really, she doesn’t. She doesn’t! It’s been nearly two and a half months already since the semester started, since she’d boarded that plane, since Stiles had not once uttered the word “goodbye” in her presence, the stubborn idiot. She doesn’t miss Allison’s sharp eyes and soft dimples, or Scott’s terrible puns and supportive hand-squeezes (oh, God, she could use one right now), or Stiles’s—well, anyway, she doesn’t miss Stiles, either.  

Best to cut those thoughts off at the root before they grow into something gentler and more fragrant.

“Yeah, okay.” Phoebe sounds skeptical. Rather, she sounds as though skepticism, as a concept, is something she has just invented for those exact words. “Quiz me, will you?”

Lydia does, because she is a good, kind roommate. As she steadily runs through questions on _Crito_ and _Nicomachean Ethics_ , as she hears Phoebe explain without mistake what the Greeks thought about love, the great cosmic essence of it, she becomes aware of rain beginning to fall outside, of the heater rattling after months of inactivity, of the periodic vibrations of her phone to which she does not respond until it’s dark and nobody can see her eyes watering as she reads all of the messages she’s ignored, just to prove to herself that she doesn’t need them.

It’s nice to be that aware of something besides the voices of ghosts, for a change.

 

 

 

 

 **iii.**  

_[linus & lucy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6zypc_LhnM) _

 

Eventually, Scott’s persistent attempts to FaceTime her wear down her resistance. The path to this surrender has already been paved, honestly, with tastefully emoji-ridden texts from Allison and repeated links to hot new Internet memes from Stiles, but that that doesn’t make her feel any less like she’s lost at something when, after a moment’s fraught hesitation, she drops her thumb onto the green _accept_ button.

She doesn’t dwell on it for very long. She can’t dwell on much of _anything_ after the camera quality improves enough for her to distinguish an eight-foot tall mountain of mossy fur over Scott’s shoulder.  

“Hey, Lydia!” Scott exclaims, waving. Only the topmost part of his face is visible—okay, so he’s _aware_ of his company, at least. “You picked up! Wow! Hey! How’s it going? How’s Harvard?”

“Scott,” Lydia says as calmly as she possibly can, “what is that?”

Scott blinks at her briefly before craning his neck over his shoulder, mouthing a comprehending “oh,” and turning back into frame with that same cheerful expression.  

“I think it’s a sasquatch?” he says, shrugging. “Maybe. It seems docile. And it likes Funyuns.”

“And it is the only creature living or dead that ever has,” Lydia retorts. “You know, Scott, you amaze me. Here is a creature that has graced the cover of the _National Enquirer_ for generations, and you’re sharing your Funyuns with it.”

“Heh.” Scott flashes her an oblique, innocent grin. “ _Somebody’s_ gotta eat them. Right, buddy?”

He cautiously extends his knuckles as if to fist-bump it. The sasquatch leans forward, intrigued, and gently swats his hand with its paw, grumbling.

“Yeeeaahhh!” Scott gives it a thumbs-up. “See? He’s learning!”

“Unbelievable,” Lydia breathes. “Absolutely unbelievable. I’m so thrilled to know that things have not changed an iota back home.”

“Well, they _kinda_ have,” Scott says. “I mean, this guy doesn’t wanna kill me, so that’s something new and different, right? And it even likes Stiles! That normally _never_ happens!”

A vision of Stiles attempting to wrestle away affection from this slobbering mountain of fur flits across Lydia’s imagination, and she has to reel in a sputter of laughter. She folds her lips in to hide the hints of it, training her features into a look of aloofness instead.

“Besides, of course things have changed,” Scott continues. “You’re not here. Everything’s different.”

He says it so frankly, so objectively, as if he’s stating the fact that the ecosystem is different after the planet has decided to stop producing rain. It throws her for a moment. What notable difference could her departure possibly make to that sleepy town that was always littered with ghosts and disturbances? She’s untethered now, unbowed, not an apparition from a bleak storybook but a breathing, brilliant girl; should Beacon Hills not be as glad to be rid of her as she is to be rid of it? And she _is_ glad to be rid of it; she’s glad to have left behind those rain-glossed streets, that fog rolling down over the hilltops before sunset; that strange and haunting feeling that seemed to rise off of the leaf-strewn sidewalks after the moon rose. She’s glad to be so far from that cliff on the edge of the words, from which Beacon Hills, from such a distance, could almost look ordinary, if she tilted her head and held her breath.

She _is_.

Scott picks a stick up off the forest floor and waves it in the air encouragingly before hurling it off somewhere. The sasquatch lumbers after it with enthusiasm. Lydia could burst into laughter right there. Leave it to Scott McCall to teach Bigfoot how to play fetch.

“I think I’m gonna name it Lydia,” he says cheekily.

“Don’t you dare,” Lydia warns him. “I will not hesitate to fly all the way back there to kill you, Scott McCall.”

“Hah,” Scott chuckles, but it’s a little crestfallen, and the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. He looks out at the trees, searching for nothing. “Definitely doing it, then.”

For another of those rare times in her life, Lydia can’t think of anything clever to say.

The conversation drifts after that. It’s mostly small talk—what have you been up to, how’s veterinary school, did you see that movie with the nice ending—but it goes on for over an hour. He walks home with Lydia still on the phone, switching the camera view so she could see the sidewalks she wishes she did not still know by heart.

Eventually, Lydia sets the phone down on her desk so she can study, but Scott doesn’t hang up—he plays a video game, waiting for her to finish, and does not press her to speak.

A memory drifts through her, unbidden, of a night in July this past summer, when Scott had texted her to meet him and the others at that same tree-edged cliff she tries so hard, now, to forget. She had almost declined, but in the end, that strange ache in her stomach had gotten the better of her. She had driven there alone before dark. Stiles had been there already, with a bonfire and a six-pack of Coca Cola. Allison had joined them soon enough, too, and she had taught them all of the constellations overhead.

Lydia had already known all of them, of course. But she had not interrupted, so taken was she with the look of wonder on Stiles’s face, with the way Orion had matched an arrangement of freckles on his throat.

“He misses you a lot, you know,” Scott says when it’s nearly eleven, yawning into his open palm.

Lydia feigns obliviousness. “Who?”

“If you could just, I dunno, text him every now and then,” Scott continues as though she had not spoken. He looks sleepy, slumped against the pillows on his bed and half-wrapped in his comforter. “Laugh at the dumb links he sends you, even if they’re not funny. He really wants you to be happy, but—you know Stiles.”

Lydia wishes she didn’t, sometimes, for the pinch his name creates between her ribs.

That old, familiar feeling washes over her, mingling with the tiredness—that maybe, despite all of her knowledge and intuition, there’s still something fundamental that she just doesn’t get.

“Yeah,” she says, drifting off to sleep herself. “I do know Stiles.”  

 

 

 

 

**iv.**

_[it never entered my mind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZeJwibieTU) _

 

 

Stiles Skypes her unexpectedly after midnight halfway through November. The unforgiving howl of the wind that’s been keeping her awake these past few nights (and manifesting itself as the cries of her banshee sisters when she dreams) is absent—it’s quiet and chilly outside when she silently opens the sliding door to carry her laptop onto the balcony and, against her better judgment, against everything in her, answer his call.

She couldn’t tell you why even if you asked. Maybe it’s the autumn chill creeping into her bones, and how much it reminds her of all those nights in the woods, when they’d been children playing games that dwarfed them. Maybe it’s the fact that, when she’d pulled an all-nighter in the library last week, the boy asleep among a chaotic field of loose papers and open books had reminded her so strongly of someone that she had fleetingly forgotten the simple act of breathing.

Maybe it’s the Red Bull. Hell if she knows. She tries not to think about it.

She’s been trying not to think about a lot of things.

“Well, well, well,” he greets her, not even bothering to hide his delight. “If it isn’t future Fields Medalist Lydia Martin.”

He looks good. Well—not, um, not _good_ ; not like _that_. He looks healthy. He looks like he’s been sleeping, which is a demeanor she is not familiar with seeing on him. It suits him. His hair has grown out again, spiked over his forehead, slightly dented from perpetual headphone use. He’s wearing a t-shirt with the vintage logo for the movie _Teen Wolf_ on it. Hilarious, Stiles.

She can’t see anything but his face and torso. He looks like he’s sitting cross-legged on his bed with the lights off, in his pajamas, no care in the world except that her webcam is on and he can see her face and this could very well be the best thing that’s happened to him in months.

“Hi, Stiles,” she says with a fond roll of her eyes. “I hope you know I was just about to fall asleep. You really have to start keeping better hours if we’re going to make this work.”

The words rush out of her before she can stop them, before she can even consider them. She has no time to reevaluate them, to deftly rearrange them into something that doesn’t compromise the frantic drumming of her heart. If Stiles notices—if he understands the significance—he does nothing to show it. He just gives her a look of over-the-top suspicion and points a finger at his webcam, accusatory.

“Ha, liar,” he scoffs. “You were probably reading Wikipedia articles about alien abductions like usual.”

Lydia scoffs, too. She had been reading a Wikipedia article about the Voynich manuscript, as a matter of fact, but she’s not about to admit that to _him_.

(Nor is she about to admit that she’s been avoiding sleep tonight because of the nightmare that had consumed her the night before, the sight of Peter’s claws in her gut and Allison’s dead eyes and screaming until she had tasted blood. That’s an anomaly. Nothing to worry about.)

“Weirdo,” Stiles adds for good measure.

“Rude,” Lydia retorts.

He chuckles at that for a good few seconds, settling onto his mattress. He’s stretched out on his stomach now, propped up by his elbows with his arms folded, fixing his webcam with a much more relaxed, sentimental smile.

“Seriously, how are you?” he asks. “It’s been, like—forever. And I get that your time is a precious commodity since you’re shooting for valedictorian and trying to sever your ties with the hell town, or whatever, but you could’ve at _least_ shared your opinion on the cockatiel that knows the _My Neighbor Totoro_ theme. Because I was waiting with baited breath on that verdict.”

“Very cute,” is what Lydia gives him.

“Right?” Stiles’s nose scrunches up. “ _So_ cute.”

“Who said anything about me trying to sever my ties with the hell town?” Lydia tries her best to sound above the question, but she’s not sure if she succeeds. “I just wanted to go to a good college, that’s all.”

“Well, yeah, but you practically left behind a dust cloud when you did,” Stiles says. “I’m surprised there’s not a Lydia-shaped hole in the ‘Welcome to Beacon Hills’ sign.”

Lydia snorts at the cartoonish vision. “You’re reading into it.”

“Uh, I am totally not,” he says, and Lydia’s eyebrows go subtly up—there’s an edge to his voice, suddenly. “Come on, Lydia. You don’t have to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” she lies, but ah, she’s already lost. “And so what if I am?” A breeze rushes through the air, making her shiver. She should have brought a hoodie (Stiles’s old lacrosse one that has ceased to smell like him, but don’t tell anyone). “If you’re trying to get preachy on me, Stiles, don’t bother. I’ve gotten it from all sides by now, and I’m not changing my mind. Besides, wanting to get as far away as possible from all of that bad horror movie garbage and everything associated with it is _not_ that crazy. I mean, I never asked for a part in it; neither did you. And if you say you’ve never thought about forgetting all of it before, you’re lying to yourself _and_ to me.”

His silence hits her right in the abdomen, firm and inescapable, and strikes a chord of panic. She’s said too much. She’s been too harsh. She’s hurt someone again. She used to be unconcerned with that possibility, but now it sends her into a frenzy of apology, a frantic rush to undo it. But better words fail her in the wake of the ones fringed with fear and spite. She says nothing. Neither does he. The light from his screen is making his skin look blue and uncanny, like that of a ghost.

She flounders helplessly. “Stiles, I’m—”

“No,” he murmurs. “No, you’re right. I have thought about it before.” He lets out a long, slow breath, eyes wandering askance. “Not for very long, though. Because I realized that—that without it, I’d be nothing.”

Insult flares in Lydia for reasons she can’t fathom. He had said nothing to offend her, only himself. And yet, she’s struck with anger—does he truly think he’s so worthless—that he wouldn’t _count?_ —without all of the remarkable things clamoring around him, invading him, crushing him with their weight?

“Before all of it started… I really was nobody,” he continues. “I had nothing going for me. I was invisible. Scott, too, but he—he was always kinda above me, you know? Nicer, brighter, better. And when all of the stuff started happening to him, it gave me something to do with myself, some reason to _be_. I felt like I was part of something. And yeah, it messed us up. It really messed us up. It wasn’t _good_ , and maybe that’s what makes me feel selfish for being glad that it happened. But. Looking back on it, on the good and the bad, it’s like… ‘Yeah. That happened. I was there. I helped.’ I existed, and there’s proof, because everybody else exists, too.” His head sinks into his open hand, and his fingers start to err over his hairline. “I can’t forget any of it. Not a second. Even the bad stuff. Because—because if I forget; like, if it didn’t happen, then… then what am I?”

“That’s awfully melodramatic of you,” Lydia says. The words should bite, but for some reason they come out tender and commiserative. She tells herself that her voice is only so quiet because she wants to keep from waking Phoebe. Another lie.

“Yeah, maybe,” he concedes. His face briefly plunges into darkness when the light from his screen dims; he clicks it back on again immediately. “The point is, Lydia… you can say you wanna forget everything that happened to us all you want, but I _know_ you can’t, because _I_ can’t; _none_ of us can. It’s okay to remember. It made us who we are.”

The weight of the words—and how right they really are—presses down on Lydia’s heart until it’s pulled itself into a taut, hardened little ball.

“Don’t you _get_ it? I don’t want who I am to be dependent on monsters and trauma!” she exclaims. The words echo through the empty hallway. “That’s why I came here in the first place! For God’s sake, I—I just wanted to prove to myself that this could still _happen_. That I could still be happy and I could still be normal and—and I could still do all the things I wanted to do before my boyfriend turned into a lizard monster and I had to bring my best friend back from the dead and _you_ —” She chokes. “Oh, forget it.”

“Lydia,” he says. It’s soft, so soft, as if her name is some holy word, some gleaming thing to hold above all else and never break or ruin.

She remembers the last time he had said her name like that—she had been dizzy and shivering on one of Deaton’s operating tables, temples clammy with sweat and blood, and he had clung to her hand and gazed at her with eyes adoring, and she had remembered; she had remembered how this boy had danced clumsily with her all that time ago; she had remembered his gentle knuckles against the window of her car; she had remembered clinging too tightly to him after pushing him away from a fire pomegranate red. She had remembered everything.

“Don’t,” she mutters, clearing her throat to bring some clarity back to her voice. She swipes discreetly at her eyes, no longer looking at the camera or at her screen but at her knees, at the goosebumps rising on her forearms. In a whisper, she tells no one, “I’m supposed to be fine. I’m supposed—”

“Lydia, you _are_ fine,” Stiles interjects. “I’m fine. We’re all fine. No matter what happens—we _did_ that. We made it. And I’m—” The slight ebb in sound tells her that he’s swallowing something, some bursting river of words he’s still not fully ready to say. “I’m proud of you. I’m really glad you picked up.”

Lydia’s teeth are beginning to chatter and her eyes to prickle with unwelcome heat. She sniffles, and tells herself it’s from the chill in the air. She wipes her nose with the back of her wrist and gives Stiles a smile, a real one, wobbly and unabashed.

“Oh, whatever,” she says. “If I want a motivational speech, I’ll call Scott.”

“Lydia, I mean it.”

She turns her eyes back to her laptop screen. Stiles is not blinking. She believes him. She always believes him.

“Okay, okay,” she replies as if to placate him. “Listen, I’m freezing my ass off; can we wrap this up so I can go inside?”

“Only if you admit you miss me,” he says slyly. He sticks out his index finger and thumb, framing his chin with them and clearly trying to look dashing. “Come on. Be honest with yourself. You miss me.”

His bravery might have seemed strange, once, but now Lydia can’t help the fond amusement that moves through her at the sight of it. It’s a joke; nothing more. Friends joke. Right?

“I do not,” Lydia says. “Good night, Stiles.”

Her finger hovers over the trackpad, over the “end call” button. Frogs are warbling in the creek across the courtyard, unbothered by the cold and by the faraway waxing moon. Stiles is saying nothing to stop her, but he hasn’t hung up, either.

“Thanks for calling me,” she says in a voice that is not her own; it’s so much more gentle, so much more adoring. “It’s nice to hear your voice.”

“You, too,” he says quietly. His mic barely picks it up. “Hey, sweet dreams, all right? No nightmares tonight. Stiles’s orders.”

Lydia laughs behind her lips. “Yes, sir.”

She sleeps peacefully that night. What can she say? Stiles gets harder and harder to defy these days.

 

 

 

 

 

**v.**

_[lullaby of birdland](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDzi8N3BYMw) _

 

 

“I know you’re all just about at your limit for living without me, so I just want to reiterate,” Lydia says to Allison approximately one week before the knock sounds at her door, “do not let Stiles come visit me.”

It’s December. The snow has started, frailly, unobtrusively, to fall. It had never snowed in Beacon Hills; it’s probably raining there now, low thunder and gusts of wind and the dense smell of petrichor.

(“I won’t,” Allison says, and damn her, Lydia thinks, because her face is so somber, so loyal, so _deceptively honest_. “Scout’s honor.”

“You’ve never been a Girl Scout.”

“Argent’s honor.”

“Somehow worse?”)

Phoebe is out, thank God, scouring the library for books on Mendeleev. Lydia is alone in the room, save for the rattle of the heater and the sound of [Lucy Rose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o84y-5-cO0) on her laptop’s built-in speakers (and don’t ever tell Allison that she had approved of that recommendation). She doesn’t know what urges her to stand up, to cross the room, to settle her fingers on the doorknob, but she doesn’t like it one bit.

Maybe it’s one of Phoebe’s friends. Maybe it’s Public Safety. Maybe somebody got their head stuck in the dryer downstairs again and the school feels the need to admonish its students of the dangers of such stunts. Hell, maybe it’s Santa Claus. It could be anything.

It’s none of these things.

“Surpriiiiise,” Stiles sings.

Lydia can do nothing, at first, but blink at him, owl-eyed. He’s huddled in her doorway with a hefty backpack on his shoulder and a knitted red stocking cap on his head, and his cheeks and nose and ears are flushed pink from the cold outside, and there are flecks of snow melting in the tips of his dark hair. He’s out of breath, as though he’s run all the way from California to here, just for her.

She wouldn’t put it past him.

“What,” she says at last, “the hell,” and she lifts a hand to shove him in the shoulder, “are _you_ doing here?”

“Spreading holiday cheer?” he suggests, looking nothing short of ecstatic about the attack. He stumbles a little, hopping on one foot out of her reach. “I could do some carols, if you want—”

“Ugh,” Lydia groans, pinching the bridge of her nose and dropping her head back to face the ceiling. “ _Why_ , God? Why? I have finals this week, you know. I have _grades_ to maintain; _perfect_ ones, thank you very much; I don’t have time for—”

“For…?” Stiles prompts her when she doesn’t finish. He leans in and waggles his eyebrows. She uses the opening to lightly swat him in the temple.

“For _this_ ,” she hisses, her unruly heartbeat made all the more agitated by the way his face lights up at those simple words. “For _you_.”

“ _This_?” he repeats, leaning forward. “Oh, please, _do_ elaborate.”

Lydia primly sets one finger on his forehead and pushes him back again. He sways, but does not lose the dopey, blissful grin.

“Okay.” He clasps his hands earnestly at his chest. “Lydia, I promise I won’t do anything to distract you. I won’t interfere with your setup at all. I’ll be so quiet it’ll be like I don’t even exist.”

“I can dream!” Lydia snaps, but Stiles’s beaming face does not dim in the slightest. “Do you know how much my roommate is going to eat this up? I’ll never live it down.”

“Man, what a shame,” Stiles sighs, nodding in faux sympathy.

“And the rules are strict around here, you know! No overnight guests!”

“Tragic,” Stiles says.

“And I’m going to have to _feed_ you, and let you use the shower in the morning, and—”

“Jesus, Lydia, I’m not _moving in_ ,” he exclaims, the first show of something besides impish glee he’s shown in this conversation. “I’m flying back tomorrow night. You’re gonna be coming home for winter break at the end of the week anyway, right? I just figured I’d drop in. Tell you you’re amazing and are gonna revolutionize the field of mathematics, you know, whatever, et cetera.” Lydia could laugh. He says it as though it is absolutely normal to fly six hours to visit someone you might kind of, sort of have feelings for (oh, who is she kidding). He sniffs, wiping furiously at his nose with his sleeve. “Steal some of your cold medicine, maybe. It is _freezing_ out there; did you know that? I spent like fifteen minutes trying to come up with a good Stiles-plus-icicle pun. _That_ is how cold it is.”

“Why don’t you quit whining and come inside, then?” Lydia asks. Not because she _wants_ him to, or anything, but even her steely heart can’t ignore a pathetic loser about to get frostbite outside her door.

Stiles quiets, and fixes her with an unreadable look. His amber eyes crackle with warmth. The song goes on, ethereal and plaintive, and Lydia looks back at Stiles, the boy who won’t give up, the boy who understands. She’s never felt farther from death or from fear. There is nothing else but Stiles, nothing else but the far-off rain of Beacon Hills, nothing else but the feeling of standing on a precipice, moments away from plummeting into something entirely new, and strange, and theirs.

After a moment, his mouth curves up. He smiles. She thaws.

“Okay,” he says, stepping over the threshold. She makes no effort to move away. “I will.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, mods, for your patience and kindness. :') 
> 
> The section titles come from some of my favorite jazz pieces! I don't know why that is a thing, but there's no turning back now. They fit the moods too nicely. Title is from "Shades of Scarlett Conquering," which is not only breathtaking (like much Joni Mitchell), but gives me too many Lydia Martin feelings to contain in my inadequate mortal body.
> 
> Oh, I wish _Teen Wolf_ was still good so I could still enjoy it. Anyway, I miss my children and all that they could be. I hope that returning to them after all this time isn't a giant failure. *fingers crossed*


End file.
